While recently I have been busy and I'm not connected on IRC especially when Auria and Hiker are there, I'm still working on SuperTuxKart and I want to share with you my recent progress.

1) For the upcoming release, Ravenbridge's Mansion is now mostly finished. All main sections of the map are now done, items are placed.While a few details there and there remains to be done, the map can be released soon, of course gameplay needs still some minor adjustment/tweaks.Each section of the map as it's own style and own appearance.- The main road to the mansion- Inside the mansion (with two different rooms to explore)- The swamp with the old bridge

- I need to create a small video to showcase the new track and maybe a poster.

2) For the future, I started some tests and concepts- I created a new GUI concept, while our UI is fine in most of the case, there are several limitations especially in the flexibility (adding/removing stuff).I think this should be improved and also simplified from a design point of view (currently a lot of stuff are hardcoded into STK).For instance adding or removing a menu is quite difficult.Maybe we should also investigate the use of a third party library to do the UI stuff for us, like QML.I also think we should (at first at least) simplify the visual look of the GUI to reduce the amount of work needed when we have to expand it.I created a quick concept art with the main menu and the setting menu.

(Icons and general colors would be of course the same to reduce the amount of work).

- I created a new logo for SuperTuxKart, while the general shape and the color palette is the same as the old one, we have now a .svg version of our logo.This is useful especially when creating large scale posters, or for high resolution monitors to avoid the low res/pixelised appearance.It will be used when we will do the first release on Steam probably since it requires some tweaking/polishing

- I also started some tests regarding linear tracks (like going down from the top of a mountain), advanced materials (like objects using metalness/albedo) and massively animated maps, but more on that later .

Now I'm not sure what you mean Do you wonder how to solve navigation in this particular case, or you are talking about guiengine limitations? I didn't look if guiengine can draw it, but Samuncle said something about third-party libraries for UI stuff.

And in this particular scene you can first navigate vertical tabs, then you press "select", and it starts navigation on the right side. When you finished, then you can press "back" and you are again in the vertical tabs on the left side. You press "back" once again and it closes settings screen.

1) Scalability across different screen size2) Being able to use the joystick3) Being able to use the GUI at full resolution while the 3D render is lower (not sure if it's possible but would be useful especially for android devices)

When you are in the main setting menu, you can simply press [Select] to go in the sub setting menu, you tweak stuff and then by pressing [Back] you can go back to the main setting selection menu.

Ideally creating a nice GUI for SuperTuxKart should be simpler than now, especially considering all screen sizes, resolutions, etc.Maybe using an external library isn't the way to go but we should make it easier/simpler to create menus/submenus.There is also tons of very small bugs like progress bars that are slightly bigger compared to other or misaligned text which gives an overall impression of low quality.Things like a simple animated background aren't possible :'(. It should be easy to do such thing

Using an external lib would free us from creating our own GUI engine and we would have to maintain only the interface between the GUI and the core engine. IMHO it's the way to go.

Arthur also mentioned on IRC why am I pushing for linear tracks, and I think it would add more variety to the challenge we have + in some case it would be easier to just design a linear track instead of trying to make it loops.

Switching to a new UI library is most likely months of work. Currently, we have no one available to work on that. Even if we had someone available, I'm convinced that a full rewrite is the right way to go, we can go a long way by smaller incremental improvements to the current UI engine. Our current UI engine is not perfect but it's not that bad either, and I'm not convinced that it warrants the huge undertaking of a full rewrite (which we can't do anyway due to lack of manpower). Many of the little glitches you mention are fixable with a couple hours of work

Things like a simple animated background aren't possible :'(.

Actually it wouldn't be very hard, we just always rejected the idea because that seemed like it would be more annoying that anything